Josh Da Costa
- bizzarre
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
Josh Da Costa shares new single "96 Year Old Girl" from his debut solo album 'New Wave Graveyard' out July 24th on Stones Throw.
Josh Da Costa shares new single "96 Year Old Girl", an absurdist glam-rock anthem, taken from his forthcoming debut solo album 'New Wave Graveyard', out on Stones Throw on the 24th of July.
Sometimes the best songs arrive when you least expect them. Case in point:
"96 Year Old Girl". “I wrote and recorded this song one night after getting really high, ordering Dominos, and watching Terminator 2,”
Josh explains.
“The verse’s vocal melody is a riff on what is known in some musical circles as ‘the lick’ – an extremely common motif in jazz music that became a meme in itself – and the chorus was an old idea that I was kicking around for years and finally found its home here.”
The song is about “pushing people away” and “the feeling you have when you know you’re not being seen by the person you’re with,” with a bit of a knowing wink.
The title came “via Brendan Sepe of the venerable LA noise rock band Semi Trucks. He was describing helping a girl move out of her house.
He then mentioned that she was 96 years old. I just thought it was so funny that he would describe a 96 year old woman as a girl.”
The video sees Josh da Costa paying tribute to Japan in full glam mode, staring deep into the eyes of a 96 year old girl. Like the rest of 'New Wave Graveyard,' “96 Year Old Girl” is played totally straight but never takes itself too seriously.
Josh says,
“I love singing the chorus because I feel like I’m caught somewhere between pretending to be Bobby Gillespie, Prince, and Peter Ivers. The instrumental features my usual bag of tricks - some jangly Gibson SG bits and my trusty SixTrak synth. Recorded in my bedroom, drums and all.”
Josh da Costa was a fixture in DIY Brooklyn in the early 2010s, when just about anyone could start a band (and just about everybody did). Weirdo musicians played at venues which have long since closed, Altered Zones and mp3 blogs drove music discovery, and everyone was somehow twenty-four.
Not long after Josh moved to LA, a house fire and the pandemic struck in quick succession, and he began work on the elegy to forgotten fantasies and faded memories that would become New Wave Graveyard. Inspiration came from the weirdest, waviest records in his collection – the same records he plays every month on his NTS show, Confusing Mix.
Nothing lasts forever: bands form and break up, friends flame out and lovers leave and treasured spaces vanish. But New Wave Graveyard bottles the feeling of being there, where the magic happened – nostalgia for a place and time that may or may not have ever existed.
Photo by Tonje Thilessen
